Compressing HTML for Wireless Internet

[sun818]

Mobile wireless internet is pretty cool. But its not DSL! So, how does one go about visiting the sites you need to see without waiting for the next full moon? Are there services? Open source scripts? Mind you, I'm not talking about WAP - this is wireless internet like T-Mobile SideKick or browsing on those Compaq, or Sharp PDAs.

[dmorison]

how does one go about visiting the sites you need to see without waiting for the next full moon?

Browse with images turned off? I presume Pocket IE and any other browser design for mobile use supports this.

I guess also that a mobile browser would offer GZIP compression to the web server - that would speed up text (i.e. raw HTML) transfer; but how noticeable a difference it would make i'm not sure.

[amznVibe]

Do PDA browsers support gzip? I kinda doubt it. But if they do, mod_gzip is the way to go.

Don't forget that Google has a cool WAP translation and caching proxy if you can get a device will at least support WAP.

You can test drive this in Opera which will also do WAP:
[google.com...]

And also the google palmtop search (not a proxy, just search) [google.com...]

[sun818]

thanks amznVibe, yeah I found those sites from some search here. google.com/palm works great - I tested it out this morning. I found one for eBay too at mmm.ebay.com - but their main site (with graphics and all) actually served up faster. I'm thinking web sites just need to support the mobile wireless format otherwise you have to download everything like a desktop browser - possibly optimized through a proxy server.